What’s brewing in Visual Studio Team Services: January 2017 Digest

This post series provides the latest updates and news for Visual Studio Team Services and is a great way for Azure users to keep up-to-date with new features being released every three weeks. Visual Studio Team Services offers the best DevOps tooling to create an efficient continuous integration and release pipeline to Azure. With the rapidly expanding list of features in Team Services, teams can start to leverage it more efficiently for all areas of their Azure workflow, for apps written in any language and deployed to any OS.

Release Management is generally available

Release Management is now generally available. Release Management enables you to create a continuous deployment pipeline for your applications with fully automated deployments, seamless integration with Azure, and end to end traceability.

Azure App Services Continuous Delivery

Additionally, Release Management is now available in the Azure Portal. You can start using this feature today by navigating to your app’s menu blade in the Azure portal and clicking on APP DEPLOYMENT > Continuous Delivery (Preview).

Package Management is generally available

Package Management is available as an extension to Team Services and Team Foundation Server 2017 for hosting your packages and making them available to your team, your builds, and your releases. In addition to support for NuGet packages, Package Management now support npm packages. If you’re a developer working with node.js, JavaScript, or any of its variants, you can now use Team Services to host private npm packages right alongside your NuGet packages.

Work Item Search is now in public preview

While Code Search is the most popular extension for Team Services and has been available for a while now, Work Item Search is now available in public preview. You can install the free Work Item Search extension from the Team Services Marketplace. With Work Item Search you can quickly and easily find relevant work items by searching across all work item fields over all projects in an account. You can perform full text searches across all fields to efficiently locate relevant work items. Use in-line search filters, on any work item field, to quickly narrow down to a list of work items.

Import TFS servers directly into Team Services

We are very excited to announce the preview of the TFS Database Import Service for Visual Studio Team Services. In the past, we have had various options that offered a low-fidelity method for migrating your data. The difference today is that the TFS Database Import Service is a high-fidelity migration that brings over your source code history, work items, builds, etc. and keeps the same ID numbers, traceability, settings, permissions personalizations, and much more. Our goal for your final production import is that your team will be working in TFS on a Friday and then be continuing their work in Visual Studio Team Services when they come back to work on Monday.

Public preview of Linux in the hosted build pool

That’s right – we have added Linux containers to our host build pool. These are running on Ubuntu Linux inside the vsts-agent-docker container. This container includes all the standard Java, Node, Docker, and .NET Core tooling. You can create or spawn other Docker containers as part of your build or release process using either a script or the Docker extension in the Visual Studio Marketplace. To use Linux, just choose Hosted Linux Preview for the default agent queue in the General section of your build definition.

Improvements to the pull request experience

We continue to enhance the pull request experience, and we’ve now added the ability to see the changes in a PR since you last looked at it, add attachments in comments, and to see and resolve merge conflicts.

JBoss and WildFly extension

The JBoss and WildFly extension provides a task to deploy your Java applications to an instance of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7 or WildFly Application Server 8 and above over the HTTP management interface. It also includes a utility to run CLI commands as part of your build/release process. Check out this video for a demo. This extension is open sourced on GitHub so reach out to us with any suggestions or issues. We welcome contributions.

There are many more updates, so I recommend taking a look at the full list of new features in the release notes for November 23rd and January 5th.